The light, perhaps, or the presence, woke Jannet, still half in a dream as she looked up into the face above her. Whose was it, so lovely with its surprised and tender smile? “Why, Mother,” she softly said, “did you come,—at last?”
“Dear heart!” exclaimed a low, musical voice. “It can’t be true, can it? You are not my own little baby that I lost,—but you have a look of Douglas! Who are you?”
Jannet, her own amazement growing as she wakened more thoroughly, raised herself on her elbow, then sat up, and the lady reached for her hand. Jannet’s other hand came to clasp more firmly the older one with its one flashing ring above a wedding ring. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought that you were my mother. See? You look just like her picture, and I suppose that you are too young, then.”
But the lady, whose breath came so quickly and who looked so eagerly into Jannet’s eyes, did not follow them to the picture. “If the picture is that of your mother, dear child, then I am your mother, for that is my picture and this is the room that was mine. Oh, how cruel, my dear, that we have had to do without each other all these years!”
Jannet’s arms went around her mother’s neck as her mother clasped her, gently, yet possessively, and the sweetest feeling of rest came to Jannet, though her throat choked some way, and she felt her mother catching her breath and trying to control herself. Then her mother sat down on the bed beside her, holding Jannet off a moment to look at her again. “I believe that this is heaven and we are both ghosts,” said Jannet, half smiling and winking hard.
“Not a bit of it,” said the other Jannet. “We are both as real as can be, though we shall be real enough there some day, I hope. Your mouth has a look of your father,—O Jannet! The tragedy of it!”
“Don’t cry, Mother! I have so much to tell you,—”
“And I so much to ask. Have you been here all these years?”
“Oh, no,—just a few weeks. Uncle Pieter found me, and oh, we must tell Uncle Pieter right away, because he feels so terribly about things he has just found out, how you must have written and telegraphed to him and he never got the telegrams and letters!”
Jannet’s mother looked at her in surprise. Her face had sobered at the mention of her brother, but now she gave close attention to what Jannet went on to explain. “I should have come,” she said, “instead of depending on messages. But I was so ill.”